To determine the success of an online marketing campaign, the e-commerce products that are generating the most user interest, or the popularity of your blog, you'll need some form of statistical analysis. How many page views are there per month? Which pages are generating the most views? Where are your visitors coming from? You need a Web traffic analysis tool to answer these questions. VisiStat 6.0, a managed service that integrates with any Web server, provides an easy-to-use interface for generating demographic data for small to midsize businesses and blogs, although it lacks some features found in traditional log file analysis tools.

To use VisiStat, you need to place a special JavaScript tag on every Web page that you wish to monitor. Adding this tag is not a challenging feat, although I had to edit all of my pages by hand in a text editor, as my Web site was not built using templates; if your site is template-based, you will find this process less tedious. The tags can also be placed on pages directly from iWeb.

I found the ability to access information in real time to be the best reason to use VisiStat. Log analysis products like Webalizer generate reports as a snapshot in time--assuming you can even access your Web server logs; some hosted Web sites and blogs don't give you that information. VisiStat updates continuously, independent of the Web server; it only took a few seconds to see my visitors show up on the analysis pages.

Statistical and demographic data generated from VisiStat was on par with Webalizer or similar traffic analysis tools. I was able to see, for example, that my home page gets more visitors than any other page on my site; that less than one percent of those visitors are using the Linux operating system; and that "mike demaria" is the search phrase used most often to find my site. VisiStat presents such data with dozens of colorful charts and bar graphs. Most charts allow you to drill down and gather further data. In the chart showing visitors per day, for example, I could click on my busiest day and see a list of visitors per hour. I could then drill down further and see a visitor's click path. VisiStat is smart enough to recognize and not include search engine spiders, which can make the hit counts appear higher than they should be.

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